Durable Medical Equipment

Durable Medical Equipment

Managing your DME with Ancillary Advantage

Ancillary Advantage DME will provide your practice an optimal way to control durable medical equipment delivery, superior to traditional manufacturer’s stock and bill programs, with the potential to far exceed doing it on your own.

Ancillary Advantage provides your practice with systems and procedures based on more than ten years of experience in billing and collecting on DME. Ancillary AdvantageDME™ provides your practice with a proven system for ensuring that your patients have access to needed clinical and post-operative medical equipment.

Ancillary Advantage will:

Prepare Your Practice to Add or Fully Realize Successful DME Services

The professionals at Ancillary Advantage will guide your practice through the process of setting up its own Durable Medical Equipment business in-house.

Manage Reimbursement

Your practice immediately leverages all our experience working with insurance companies on patient approvals, billing and collecting specifically for DME.

Design and Manage Financial Reports and Program Policies

The operations team at Ancillary Advantage provides an essential reason why successful practices choose Ancillary Advantage’s services. With Ancillary Advantage practices receive key monthly operations and profitability reports that provide information in assessing the effectiveness of the program and determining additional areas for improvement.

Take Control of Inventory

With Ancillary Advantage, Ancillary Advantage will provide the products you choose, for your patients. Our extensive experience ensures that you stock the correct product mix and access the right manufacturers to meet your individual practice needs. We are manufacturer neutral. We specialize in helping you add items that you currently are not providing to your patients, increasing service levels and patient care.

Manage the Professional On-site Personnel, on behalf of the Practice, and Fully Customize Implementation

Practices that contract with Ancillary Advantage can choose to have a full time DME Coordinator on-site to administer and manage the program. We work with the practice to find the right DME Coordinator to fit specific credentials and the practice’s work environment.

What are Medical Foods?

The term medical food, as defined in section 5(b) of the Orphan Drug Act (21 U.S.C. 360ee (b) (3)) is "a food which is formulated to be consumed or administered enterally under the supervision of a physician and which is intended for the specific dietary management of a disease or condition for which distinctive nutritional requirements, based on recognized scientific principles, are established by medical evaluation." Your Ancillary Advantage representative can provide you with additional background information on medical foods, including a report from Frost and Sullivan on the impact these products are having on health care.

How do they differ from supplements?

Supplements support the healthy function of the body by adding to substances already in the body. For example, glucosamine and chondroitin, taken for osteoarthritis, naturally occur in the body's joints. Glucosamine stimulates joint repair, chondroitin maintains joint viscosity.

Supplements are regulated by the FDA as a food (not a drug). There is no requirement that their effectiveness be based upon medical or scientific evidence and they do not require a prescription.

Commercial payers include insurance companies such as Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Aetna, United Healthcare, etc. Patients covered by these payers often times have a pharmacy benefit card that enables them to fill their prescriptions at a retail pharmacy. However, these prescriptions can also be filled in your office at the point of care through our Cash and Carry program.

The Ancillary Advantage Cash and Carry program is offered to patients as an alternative to having their prescriptions filled at a retail pharmacy. We provide you with a product formulary that includes most of the medications that you are already prescribing to your patients.

Prescriptions are filled and the practice collects the co-payment amount that would otherwise be paid to the retail pharmacy. There is no need to process a prescription card for adjudication and payment. In addition to being a convenient option for your patients, a cash and carry program is also a financial revenue opportunity for your practice.